pIt s tough to prove gender bias./ppIn a real-world setting, typically the most we can do is identify differences in outcome. A man is selected for hire over a woman; fewer women reach tenure track positions; there s a gender gap in publications. Bias may be suspected in some cases, but the difficulty in using outcomes to prove it is that the differences could be due to many potential factors. We can speculate: perhaps women are less interested in the field. Perhaps women make lifestyle choices that lead them away from leadership positions. In a real-world setting, when any number of variables can contribute to an outcome, it s essentially impossible to tease them apart and pinpoint what is causative./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters[More]/a
p Many clinical research studies are funded by pharmaceutical companies and there is a general perception that such industry-based funding could potentially skew the results in favor of a new medication or device. The rationale underlying this perception regarding the influence of industry funding is fairly straightforward. Pharmaceutical companies or device manufacturers need to increase the sales of newly developed drugs or devices in order to generate adequate profits. It would be in their best interest to support research that favors their corporate goals. Even though this rationale makes intuitive sense, it does not necessarily prove that industry-funding does influence the results of trials. However, there is also data to support the fact that the funding source does seem to correlate with the outcomes of clinical trials./ppOne such study was conducted by Paul Ridker and Jose Torres and published in 2006 in JAMA ( Journal of the American Medical Association ). Ridker and Torres analyzed randomized cardiovascular trials published in leading, peer-reviewed medical journals ( JAMA, The Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine ) during the five year period of 2000-2005 in which one treatment strategy was directly compared to a competing treatment. They found that 67.2% of studies funded exclusively by for-profit organizations favored the newer treatment, whereas only 49.0% of studies funded by non-profit organizations (such as non-profit foundations and state or federal government agencies) showed results in favor of the newer treatment. This contrast was even more pronounced for pharmaceutical drugs, where 65.5% of the industry sponsored studies showed benefits of the newer treatment, while only 39.5% of non-profit funded studies favored the new treatment./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=can-the-source-of-funding-for-medical-research-affect-the-results[More]/a
p One of the creeds of the open access movement is that free access to literature aides the transfer of knowledge from wealthier, better funded nations to researchers in developing nations. There is little to no doubt that increased access to research results has beneficial reverberations in several directions #8211; but like many hypothetical benefits, they only work well if those on the receiving end can efficiently reap those benefits./ppOpen access works in a number of ways, but the most common are the author-pays model (referred to as gold open access) and the institutional repository model (part of what is referred to as green open access). The author-pays model has several issues associated with it, namely that the author(s) must secure funds to publish their work. This is often untenable no matter what country you work in or what your funding situation may be. For the repository system to work, institutions or individuals must set up and maintain #8211; at their own expense #8211; servers with an online database of their staff#8217;s research results. Both remove costs from the reader, though. To summarize how costs are distributed:/p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=bandwidth-and-open-access-in-developing-countries[More]/a
p I#8217;m having a bit of a break this weekend catching up with my Dads-in-law. I#8217;m pleased to present a guest post from Andy Wang who works as a Microbiology Research Associate at Emeryville Pharmaceutical Services . /pp Flesh Eating Bacteria Can Infect Anyone What You Should Know /p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=guest-post-flesh-eating-bacteria[More]/a
pWe sign our names to various documents all the time. Some signatures seal a legal contract. Others pledge us to an action. Now a study finds that when and where someone sign a document can influence the likelihood of them being honest or cheating./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=the-difference-between-honesty-and-12-09-23[More]/a
